Into the Past

“What’ll Become of Me?” Finding the Real Patsey of 12 Years a Slave

With 12 Years a Slave putting Solomon Northup’s story in the spotlight, Katie Calautti attempts to discover the fate of Patsey—and learns just how impossible it can be to find one woman when that woman was a slave.

When a free black man named Solomon Northup was rescued from 12 years of bondage in January of 1853, a fellow slave, a young woman named Patsey, called after him tearfully. One hundred sixty-one years later, Northup's account of his kidnapping and time as a slave on Edwin Epps's Louisiana plantation has been authenticated by scholars with annotated versions of Northup’s book, supplemental textbooks and articles detailing his life. Last year's big-screen adaptation of his narrative, 12 Years a Slave, is currently nominated for nine Academy Awards—including a best supporting actress nod for the woman who plays Patsey, Lupita Nyong’o. Yet Patsey’s haunting question, “What’ll become of me?”, remains unanswered.

What became of this girl, Northup’s close acquaintance and one of the major figures in his book, who was terrorized by her master and mistress? Did she succumb to one of the bouts of disease that swept the Louisiana-bayou slave communities? Did Epps’s severe beatings or his wife’s unhinged jealousy take their toll, or did he perhaps sell her some time after 1853? Was she secreted away by members of the Underground Railroad? Did she survive until emancipation rolled through the area via the Red River Campaign in 1864, then travel elsewhere? Or did she remain in Louisiana?

For more than two months, I have considered these possibilities and more, in an attempt to respond to Patsey’s plea. I have scoured annotated versions of Northup’s text, census records, court documents, online genealogy databases, libraries, and newspapers from the era. I’ve spoken with experts in the fields of genealogy and historical research, consulted professors, archivists and historians, even traveled to the town in Louisiana where Epps’s plantation, once stood—all in an attempt to track Patsey’s life after Northup’s departure in 1853. I practically went cross-eyed after days of squinting at vital records recorded in miniscule cursive writing; I pulled archival books as heavy as small children from high shelves in cavernous, dusty warehouses; I almost hydroplaned into ditches while exploring unpaved backroads during rainstorms. I drove through towns with a Louisiana-history picture book on my lap in an attempt to match the old and new. I hand-cranked microfiche machines until my wrist was so stiff I couldn’t move it. The investigation has unearthed two new theories for every one posed, protruding from the murk of research like so many cypress knees lining Louisiana’s bayous. How can it be this hard to find one woman? The question seems as deceptively simple as Patsey’s, but the difficulty in answering proves emblematic of the lost histories of many slaves.

Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, Michael Fassbender as Epps, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave.

Courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

“Do you have a year of your life to spare?” I’d heard similar versions of this retort in the wake of introducing my article’s subject, but it wasn’t until my third day in central Louisiana that I truly started to believe it. This one came from John Lawson, local historian and patron of the Alexandria Genealogical Library —a space flush with resources and rife with knowledgeable volunteers, all of whom have a passion for the subject. "Oh, but you'll find her eventually," Lawson quickly followed up. No one else I’d spoken with at that point seemed to think it possible.

I prepared for my time in Patsey’s South for a month and a half, beginning with the facts of Northup’s book (my particular copy being an enhanced edition by Dr. Sue Eakin, the LSU of Alexandria professor and historian who devoted her life to researching Northup’s story). Northup spent 10 of his 12 enslaved years as Epps’s property, the latter eight of them on his plantation in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana, in an area near Bunkie known now as Eola, then as Holmesville. He worked alongside Patsey and six other slaves (Abram, Wiley, Phebe, Bob, Henry, and Edward)—all but Edward came to Louisiana from neighboring plantations in Williamsburg County, South Carolina. Piecing together the genealogy of a slave, as it turns out, almost always must happen through reconstructing those of his or her owners.

In 12 Years a Slave, Northup cites Patsey as “the offspring of a ‘Guinea nigger,’ brought over to Cuba in a slave ship, and in the course of trade transferred to Buford, who was her mother’s owner.” That owner, said in the book to be James Buford (more likely named William J. Buford, according to 1830 and 1840 census records from Williamsburg County that I found), is said to have fallen upon hard times and sold her, along with a group of others, to Archibald P. Williams of Rapides Parish, Louisiana, near Alexandria.

The exact year of Patsey’s relocation across state lines is unknown. Epps was an overseer on the Oakland Plantation, near Alexandria, patented by Williams, and he was given the slaves as payment for his wages in that role. Conveyance papers from Williams to Epps for the group no longer exist, as the Rapides courthouse was burned by Northern soldiers in 1864, destroying almost all records (not an uncommon scenario during the Civil War). But we know Patsey was with Epps as of 1843, when he purchased Northup and leased the Bayou Huffpower plantation of his wife’s uncle Joseph B. Robert, before moving them to the 300-acre plot of his Avoyelles Parish plantation on Bayou Boeuf in 1845.

Northup’s book cites Patsey as being 23 years old, though his proclamation of that age could’ve occurred any time during his 10 years with her, making it a sliding scale (most likely, he was referring to her age when he left her in 1853). Pre-1850 U.S. Census records only separate slaves by gender and catalogue them within age-group intervals of five to 10 years, but in 1850 and 1860 there were separate Slave Schedule census records taken. Regardless, no names were included with each slave entry, and ages were often approximated. Deducing from the general ages of the other slaves on Epps’s farm within Northup’s text, Patsey appears as the entry for a black female, aged 19, in Epps’s 1850 Slave Schedule. Using all these factors as a guide, it’s safe to estimate that she was born around 1830 in South Carolina.

If Patsey died of disease, fatigue, or abuse before 1864, there’d be no record of it. “Imagine a disease taking its toll much worse on the enslaved community,” explains Christopher Stacey, Ph.D., associate professor of history at LSU of Alexandria. “Measles, mumps, yellow fever, malaria . . . chicken pox. . . . They affected the enslaved population that much more because of the abuse, because of the hard living conditions in the slave cabins, because of damage to bodies and minds. There are accounts of slaves dying, literally, of repeated abuse from a psychological standpoint. It would be the same as looking at somebody with PTSD catching pneumonia and dying inexplicably. We know now that healthiness and being healthy is as much psychological as it is physiological.”

The sad reality is that slaves were property, considered very expensive livestock, and there were few regulations governing their treatment and whereabouts. “There were laws in the antebellum South which regulated and dictated how slave owners treated slaves—there was a minimum standard,” explains Stacey. “Now, a record of the enforcement of those laws? That’s dicier. I don’t think compliance was part of it. I think every law that was written in each of the states restricted excessive abuse and violence, which is relative. The laws specifically were written to protect the institution of slavery.” This also means that if a slave died on an owner’s plantation, they were not required to report the death and could choose where and how the body was to be interred—on their own property, in a cemetery, or elsewhere. “There was not a uniform standard or rule as far as burying slaves,” says Stacey.

Most slave cemeteries and graves from the era remain unmarked. The closest African-American burial plots to Epps’s land that stand today reside in the cemetery at First St. Joseph’s Baptist Church. After looking through archived papers, the church’s deacon, Willie Johnson, confirmed that it was established in 1875 and the land for its location was donated on July 26, 1888. If she survived beyond emancipation and remained in the area, it’s entirely possible that she was a member of this church, and—if she had children—they would've attended the adjoining school.

On my second day in Louisiana, I scrutinized the weathered headstones of the First St. Joseph’s cemetery with Bunkie, Louisiana-based historian Meredith Melançon, searching for any record of Patsey. We met through Melançon’s incredible University of Louisiana at Lafayette work on the website called Acadiana Historical. I happened upon it while attempting to piece together Patsey-centric locations of the Northup Trail in preparation for my trip to Louisiana, and the two of us became fast friends. "If I was Patsey and I survived to emancipation, I’d get the heck outta this place—as far away from Edwin Epps as possible," exclaimed Melançon, while squinting at a particularly illegible white marble marker. It was a drizzly, unusually cold day in early February—a fitting environment for a tour of the landmarks related to Patsey’s life.

Against all odds, Patsey was young and very strong—she was one of Epps’s most valuable and profitable workers. Northup writes, “Such lightning-like motion was in her fingers as no other fingers ever possessed, and therefore it was, that in cotton picking time, Patsey was queen of the field.” Despite that, she suffered incalculable emotional and physical abuse at the hands of Epps and his wife, Mary. “Her back bore the scars of a thousand stripes; not because she was backward in her work, nor because she was of an unmindful and rebellious spirit, but because it had fallen to her lot to be the slave of a licentious master and a jealous mistress,” Northup describes. “She shrank before the lustful eye of the one, and was in danger even of her life at the hands of the other, and between the two, she was indeed accursed. . . . Nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer, and more than once, when Epps had refused to sell her, has she tempted me with bribes to put her secretly to death, and bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp.” Could it be possible that Mary’s request fell to someone with fewer moral scruples than Northup after his departure? It’s entirely possible.

An illustration of Patsey’s whipping from the book 12 Years a Slave.

From Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853. Auburn [N.Y.]: Derby and Miller, 1853.

Of all the injustices outlined in Northup’s narrative, one particularly brutal whipping of Patsey at the hands of her master and Northup (who was forced into the act against his will) left her near death. The description of the scene resonated with readers, and was often cited in newspaper reviews of the book at the time; it provides the devastating emotional climax of the movie 12 Years a Slave, as well. Northup’s account of Patsey’s whipping is horrifying, made even more unbearable by the circumstances that led to it. Because Mistress Epps refused to give Patsey soap for washing, she left the plantation without permission in order to borrow some from a neighbor. Master Epps was so enraged upon her return that she was immediately staked to the ground, and Northup was ordered to whip her. Obliging out of fear, he “struck her as many as 30 times” before attempting to stop, but after being forced, he “inflicted 10 or 15 blows more,” until refusing to continue, “risking the consequences.” At that point, Epps assumed the whip and continued until she was, Northup describes, “literally flayed.” Though Patsey survived the unimaginable punishment, “from that time forward,” he writes, “she was not what she had been.”

It’s heartbreaking to ponder how someone so young, who possessed such dignity under unimaginably inhuman circumstances, finally had her spirit broken in this manner. And this brings us back to Melançon’s idea that Patsey would “get the heck outta there” after emancipation, and some theories about where she may have gone. Alas, theories are almost all I have to work with—so much of constructing Patsey’s history involves small pieces of fact linked by large gaps caulked with conjecture.

The Secondhand-Newspaper Account
Browsing the Library of Congress’s newspaper archive website, Chronicling America, I came upon perhaps the biggest discovery of my research—an 1895 clipping from the Idaho Register (a wire story from the National Tribune in Washington, D.C.) called “About the Campfire: Truthful Tales Told by the Veterans.” It detailed—under a section titled “Bayou Boeuf”—a veteran’s recollection of Northern soldiers recounting a visit to Epps’s plantation, “soon after the war.” The soldiers (and the narrator) had read Northup’s book, and were curious about the truth of the story. It’s said that they “told of seeing and talking with his former slave comrades, whose names were Uncle Abram, Wiley, Aunt Phoebe, Patsy, Bob, Henry, and Edward.” Misspelling aside (quite common), this is a fairly huge breakthrough as far as validating Patsey’s presence on Epps’s plantation right before emancipation. The rub: this was recounted 30 years after the fact, and it’s entirely possible that the narrator simply cracked open his copy of 12 Years a Slave so as to properly cite the names of every slave on Epps’s plantation. It’s as plausible that the soldiers simply told him they spoke with some of Northup’s fellow slaves, but didn’t name names.

The 1860 Avoyelles Parish Slave Schedule
Epps’s 1860 U.S. Census Slave Schedule cites a total of 12 slaves—just four more than he owned a decade prior. There is an entry for a 34-year-old female, who could possibly be Patsey (again accounting for the license used with recording of ages on these records). No conveyance of her sale before that time exists at the Marksville courthouse, which holds all remaining records for the Avoyelles Parish area from that time.

Patsey Williams/Patsey Buford
Upon emancipation, slaves had no money or means, and were often forced into a life of sharecropping. Those who left their former owners were sometimes assumed their master’s surname, if they didn't already have one (this is how Solomon’s father, Mintus Northup, received his last name, as it happens). “It depends on what they wanted,” explains Elizabeth Shown Mills, former president of the Board for Certification of Genealogists and co-author of The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color. “There were times it went back to the mother’s owner, sometimes the owner of their grandparents. The premise here is that most slaves did not leave their comfort zones. They didn’t leave that neighborhood in which they grew up. And so you’re going to find them, for decades after the war, generally in that same community. Of course exceptions existed, but they were less likely to exist with females.” Her mother’s owner’s surname was Buford, though it’s likely her mother also accompanied Patsey to the Williams plantation in Louisiana. I came across one record of a “Patsy Buford” in the 1910 U.S. Census from Flat Rock, Kershaw, South Carolina. She’s listed as 80 years old (keeping with the 1830 birth date), and both of her parents are listed as having been born in South Carolina. Keeping in mind Mills’s “comfort zone” rule, it’s more likely that the 1870 U.S. Census uncovered for a 40-year-old Patsey Williams in Cheneyville (Rapides Parish) could be a lead. Also considering Mills’s enlightening point that Patsey is, in fact, a nickname for Martha, it’s easy to see how the possibilities can become endless.

The Underground Railroad
Northup’s narrative makes it clear that Patsey was aware of the possibility of freedom. He writes, “Patsey’s life, especially after her whipping, was one long dream of liberty. Far away . . . she knew there was a land of freedom. A thousand times she had heard that somewhere in the distant North there were no slaves—no masters.” This makes it possible to consider she sought help through outside means. Though Northup’s ultimate fate is also unknown (he disappeared in the early 1860s), scholars have unearthed persuasive evidence that he was part of the Underground Railroad. It makes sense that Northup would’ve found his way into this line of work—his experience, along with Patsey’s last words, had to haunt him. He almost certainly didn’t travel back to Louisiana (Underground Railroad agents rarely operated in the Deep South), but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have helped engineer Patsey’s rescue from up North. There’s an Underground Railroad location in Pollock, Louisiana—51 minutes north of Eola—called Oction House, established in 1861, which could’ve served as Patsey’s first stop. Because of its clandestine nature, there are very few Underground Railroad records, but it remains a possibility because it cannot, as of now, be officially refuted. Permanent work with the Underground Railroad could also corroborate Northup’s disappearance, as joining meant separation from his life in upstate New York, and almost certain anonymity.

Patsey Epps.
“Considering all of the suffering—emotional and physical—that he [Epps] inflicted on her, I cannot see Patsey, as a free woman, taking his surname,” says Mills. Still, she admits, “You don’t want to pass up any possibility, no matter how slim.” Patsey might have assumed the Epps surname, which was a popular name throughout the South. Patsey was also not an unusual first name, so—without a tie from Louisiana to one of these other areas to corroborate the evidence—these listings remain distant possibilities. The most likely possibility was found within a search for a Patsey Epps born around 1830 in South Carolina (keeping in mind that spelling and ages on these documents are flexible), wherein I pulled a 1900 U.S. Census listing for a 70-year-old Patsy Epps born in South Carolina and living in Washington, Mississippi—about two hours north of Edwin Epps’s plantation.

The Secondhand Newspaper Account

This 1895 clipping from the Idaho Register (a wire story from the National Tribune in Washington, D.C.) details—under a section titled “Bayou Boeuf”—a veteran’s recollection of Northern soldiers recounting a visit to Epps’s plantation, “soon after the war.” The soldiers (and the narrator) had read Northup’s book, and were curious about the truth of the story. It’s said that they “told of seeing and talking with his former slave comrades, whose names were Uncle Abram, Wiley, Aunt Phoebe, Patsy, Bob, Henry, and Edward.

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Bunkie is the kind of place where you can drive miles before seeing anything but a church or gas station, and the scenery—even amid the area’s unusual early February snow flurries and frost—is haunting, seemingly plucked from another time. This is lowcountry, where soybeans, corn, and sugar cane are produced in sprawling fields, homesteads perched aside them neatly. Drive along the bayous and the views are strangely preserved—the lots are narrow and long, just as they were in the 1800s, when they were situated to allow every plot waterfront access for transportation of goods. Even when viewing the homes, it’s difficult to distinguish the time period—new residences are fashioned in the classic Creole style, and old dwellings are beautifully restored. Palmetto bushes line the bayou banks, lending credence to the accounts Northup wrote of escaped slaves hiding in the dense greenery for months. Ancient oaks (which get wider—not taller—with age) dot the horizon; cypresses soak in the bayous—their knees jutting from still pools of water—and pecan trees line acres of land in orderly rows. It’s an area deeply steeped in its history, and its residents are fiercely protective of that fact. As a New Yorker shouldering the pressure of a time crunch, my instinct was to economize—I quickly learned that every action needed to be padded by at least 45 minutes. It didn’t matter where I went—a library, hotel lobby, or coffee shop—I was greeted warmly, identified almost immediately as an out-of-towner (yes, it’s that obvious) and, upon describing my project, was privy to boundless enthusiasm and a flurry of tips and anecdotes. In this town, everybody knows everyone who knows something about someone from someplace. The Louisiana welcome is a deep, cozy rabbit hole—I’m not entirely sure I’ve yet dug my way out.

My research in Louisiana also centered upon finding a cause of death for Edwin Epps, in pursuit of some manner of cosmic justice for Patsey. (If his will was written prior to emancipation, she would be listed among his inventory if she was still with him at the time). It’s documented that he passed away in 1867, and his wife died shortly thereafter—both are interred at Fogleman Cemetery, a short distance from where his plantation once stood, though their headstones have long since been lost. (The space itself is completely overgrown—a few original headstones, a historic marker and a fence are all that separate it from a forgotten patch of farmland).

Epps’s will exists at the Marksville courthouse (I held the original, as it happens). His inventory proved enlightening—his children and wife Mary were named, as were all of the items currently on or within his plantation. As it turns out, the papers were drawn up post-emancipation (on April 27, 1867, shortly after he died), so there was no record of Patsey. There was mention of outstanding debts that included a cotton order from New Orleans, with the stated proceeds being split among his laborers—proving that he did have either sharecroppers or hired laborers working his farm at the time of his death, one of whom could possibly have been Patsey.

“What we know about slavery is heavily weighted to the larger slave owners,” explains Stacey. “Around 50 percent of slave owners in the antebellum South owned 25 or fewer slaves over the course of their slave-owning ‘career.’” Epps falls firmly within the average of that group, having owned between eight and 12 slaves at any given time. “There’s a whole yeoman or middle-class slave-owning group of people we don’t know a lot about,” says Stacey. “Most of the largest planters kept thorough records, but it’s less likely that this group of people kept thorough records because they didn’t have enough resources. They were quite often working right next to their slaves picking cotton, breaking corn.” This means that Patsey’s fate was, in many ways, directly tied to that of Epps. “These are men, women, and families who owned a few slaves throughout their lives,” says Stacey. “The recession would hit and they’d have to sell off a few of their slaves. How did they treat their slaves? I suspect it’s just as uneven as their richer counterparts, but we don’t know that. My sense is that they’re ranges of extreme. Either they were very benevolent or they were very, very sadistic—because they had to live and work and exist in much closer proximity to their slaves than the larger plantation owners.”

During my first day in Louisiana, I attempted to navigate from my hotel in Bunkie to the LSU of Alexandria campus. Bunkie is a small town (population 4,171, according to the 2010 U.S. Census) that envelops the area where Epps resided on his plantation from 1845 until his death in 1867. I was utterly unfamiliar with the geography of these areas at the time; I had yet to pinpoint or visit any local landmarks, and my iPhone G.P.S. would prove both vital and flawless throughout my four days in Louisiana—save this one outing. As I set off from my hotel to LSU–A, I was directed away from the interstate. I didn’t think much of it until the friendly automated female voice told me to take a right onto a dirt road. It was pouring rain—so, naturally, the G.P.S. proceeded to lead me through the muddiest, narrowest pebble-and-dirt-strewn roads I’ve ever seen—all of them cutting through the middle of endless fields, flanked by perilously deep puddle-encrusted ditches.

The GPS navigated my near peril for 20 minutes—atop rickety one-lane wooden bridges, through flooded slopes—until it finally, mercifully, directed me onto a paved street. I took a right and—drove past my hotel. Instead of the correct direct left from my hotel to the highway, I was driven in a senseless detour through a circular snarl of back roads. I recounted the puzzling hilarity over dinner that night while being handily schooled in the art of crawfish consumption by Melançon, her husband David, mother-in-law, Marjorie Melançon, LSU–A archivist Michelle Riggs and Professor Stacey. Their eyes widened as I described the ordeal between twists and cracks of the spice-covered red crustaceans, recounting the local flair of the street names (Catfish Kitchen Road! Oil Field Road! Bear Corner Road!). “Do you know where your G.P.S. took you?” Meredith asked. I shook my head. “Around the perimeter of what used to be Edwin Epps’s plantation,” she deadpanned.

It was a goose-bump-inducing moment, and remains a perfect metaphor for my dually frustrating and elating pursuit of Patsey. Have I simply been circling the truth of what happened to her, wading through the muck of missing links and leads pointing me in wayward directions?

“There is no way to estimate how long it could take to find Patsey,” said Mills. “It could take months. It could take years. Records were not created for genealogical purposes; they were not created for historical purposes. Public records are created for legal purposes. Censuses were created for analytical purposes. And so they created what was needed. We, as researchers, have to learn all of the different resources that exist for an area, and then we have to learn all of the different techniques to link little different pieces of data into a whole person. In the end, a person is more than a name—a person is a concrete set of characteristics. We assemble as many pieces of those characteristics as possible, and we use that to help us narrow down. It is an incredible amount of work.”

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., whose PBS genealogy television show Finding Your Roots enlists well-known personalities to explore genealogy, calls genealogical research “another way of doing American History. [. . .] When you find out that your great grandfather fought in the American Revolution or your very great grandfather fought in the Civil War, you can never think of the Revolution or the Civil War in the same way." That impact can be even more significant for African-Americans,” he says. “The most moving part [of Finding Your Roots] for African-Americans is when we introduce them to their ancestors who were slaves, by name. Putting a face and a name on a historical event is what genealogy excels at doing. There's nothing quite like it."

I still desperately want to know what happened to Patsey. I want to believe she was able to survive, to prevail, and then to thrive on her own. As nobody’s property. As master of her own body and mind. I searched for her right up until the moment this piece was due—there’s still a thick stack of notes and to-do lists next to my computer. I’m not ready to crumple them in the trash uncrossed, unchecked. It feels too much like discarding a life.

I hope this piece serves as a jumping-off point—as a call to action and a call to love and healing. A battle cry among Melançon, Riggs, and me became “Viva la Patsey!” She is long gone, but her story never died. We cannot be hindered by what appears to be a lost cause—unearthing these narratives of our country’s painful history will set us on the path to understanding and willing ourselves not to repeat it. Let’s allow Patsey’s plea to resonate for countless others—because if we don’t consider what became of them, what’ll become of us?